Why doesn’t the publicly available kernrate work on Windows x64? (and how to fix it)

Previously, I wrote up an introduction to kernrate (the Windows kernel profiler). In that post, I erroneously stated that the KrView distribution includes a version of kernrate that works on x64. Actually, it supports IA64 and x86, but not x64. A week or two ago, I had a problem on an x64 box of mine that I wanted to help track down using kernrate. Unfortunately, I couldn’t actually find a working kernrate for Windows x64 (Srv03 / Vista).

It turns out that nowhere is there a published kernrate that works on any production version of Windows x64. KrView ships with an IA64 version, and the Srv03 resource kit only ships with an x86 version only. (While you can run the x86 version of kernrate in Wow64, you can’t use it to profile kernel mode; for that, you need a native x64 version.)

A bit of digging turned up a version of kernrate labeled ‘AMD64’ in the Srv03 SP0 DDK (the 3790.1830 / Srv03 SP1 DDK doesn’t include kernrate at all, only documentation for it, and the 6000 WDK omits even the documentation, which is really quite a shame). Unfortunately, that version of kernrate, while compiled as native x64 and theoretically capable of profiling the x64 kernel, doesn’t actually work. If you try to run it, you’ll get the following error:

So, no dice even with the Srv03 SP0 DDK version of kernrate, or so I thought. Ironically, the various flavors of x86 (including 3790.0) kernrate I could find all worked on Srv03 x64 SP1 (3790.1830) / Vista x64 SP0 (6000.0), but as I mentioned earlier, you can’t use the profiling APIs to profile kernel mode from a Wow64 program. So, I had a kernrate that worked but couldn’t profile kernel mode, and a kernrate that should have worked and been able to profile kernel mode except that it bombed out right away.

After running into that wall, I decided to try and get ahold of someone at Microsoft who I suspected might be able to help, Andrew Rogers from the Windows Serviceability group. After trading mails (and speculation) back and forth a bit, we eventually determined just what was going on with that version of kernrate.

To understand what the deal is with the 3790.0 DDK x64 version of kernrate, a little history lesson is in order. When the production (“RTM”) version of Windows Server 2003 was released, it was supported on two platforms: x86, and IA64 (“Windows Server 2003 64-bit”). This continued until the Srv03 Service Pack 1 timeframe, when support for another platform “went gold” – x64 (or AMD64). Now, this means that the production code base for Srv03 x64 RTM (3790.1830) is essentially comparable to Srv03 x86 SP1 (3790.1830). While normally, there aren’t “breaking changes” (or at least, these are tried to kept to a minimum) from service pack to service pack, Srv03 x64 is kind of a special case.

You see, there was no production / RTM release of Srv03 x64 3790.0, or a “Service Pack 0” for the x64 platform. As a result, in a special case, it was acceptable for there to be breaking changes from 3790.0/x64 to 3790.1830/x64, as pre-3790.1830 builds could essentially be considered beta/RC builds and not full production releases (and indeed, they were not generally publicly available as in a normal production release).

If you’re following me this far, you’re might be thinking “wait a minute, didn’t he say that the 3790.0 x86 build of kernrate worked on Srv03 3790.1830?” – and in fact, I did imply that (it does work). The breaking change in this case only relates to 64-bit-specific parts, which for the most part excludes things visible to 32-bit programs (such as the 3790.0 x86 kernrate).

In this particular case, it turns out that part of the SYSTEM_BASIC_INFORMATION structure was changed from the 3790.0 timeframe to the 3790.1830 timeframe, with respect to x64 platforms.

The 3790.0 structure, as viewed from x64 builds, is approximately like this:

Essentially, three ULONG_PTR fields were “contracted” from 64-bits to 32-bits (by changing the type to a fixed-length type, such as ULONG). The cause for this relates again to the fact that the first 64-bit RTM build of Srv03 was for IA64, and not x64 (in other words, “64-bit Windows” originally just meant “Windows for Itanium”, something that is to this day still unfortunately propagated in certain MSDN documentation).

According to Andrew, the reasoning behind the difference in the two structure versions is that those three fields were originally defined as either a pointer-sized data type (such as SIZE_T or ULONG_PTR – for 32-bit builds), or a 32-bit data type (such as ULONG – for 64-bit builds) in terms of the _IA64_ preprocessor constant, which indicates an Itanium build. However, 64-bit builds for x64 do not use the _IA64_ constant, which resulted in the structure fields being erroneously expanded to 64-bits for the 3790.0/x64 builds. By the time Srv03 x64 RTM (3790.1830) had been released, the page counts had been fixed to be defined in terms of the _WIN64 preprocessor constant (indicating any 64-bit build, not just an Itanium build). As a result, the fields that were originally 64-bits long for the prerelease 3790.0/x64 build became only 32-bits long for the RTM 3790.1830/x64 production build. Note that due to the fact the page counts are expressed in terms of a count of physical pages, which are at least 4096 bytes for x86 and x64 (and significantly more for large physical pages on those platforms), keeping them as a 32-bit quantity is not a terribly limiting factor on total physical memory given today’s technology, and that of the foreseeable future, at least relating to systems that NT-based kernels will operate on).

The end result of this change is that the SYSTEM_BASIC_INFORMATION structure that kernrate 3790.0/x64 tries to retrieve is incompatible with the 3790.1830/x64 (RTM) version of Srv03, hence the call failing with c0000004 (otherwise known as STATUS_INFO_LENGTH_MISMATCH). The culimination of this is that the 3790.0/x64 version of kernrate will abort on production builds of Srv03, as the SYSTEM_BASIC_INFORMATION structure format is incompatible with the version kernrate is expecting.

Normally, this would be pretty bad news; the program was compiled against a different layout of an OS-supplied structure. Nonetheless, I decided to crack open kernrate.exe with IDA and HIEW to see what I could find, in the hopes of fixing the binary to work on RTM builds of Srv03 x64. It turned out that I was in luck, and there was only one place that actually retrieved the SYSTEM_BASIC_INFORMATION structure, storing it in a global variable for future reference. Unfortunately, there were a great many references to that global; too many to be practical to fix to reflect the new structure layout.

However, since there was only one place where the SYSTEM_BASIC_INFORMATION structure was actually retrieved (and even more, it was in an isolated, dedicated function), there was another option: Patch in some code to retrieve the 3790.1830/x64 version of SYSTEM_BASIC_INFORMATION, and then convert it to appear to kernrate as if it were actually the 3790.0/x64 layout. Unfortunately, a change like this involves adding new code to an existing binary, which means that there needs to be a place to put it. Normally, the way you do this when patching a binary on-disk is to find some padding between functions, or at the end of a PE section that is marked as executable but otherwise unused, and place your code there. For large patches, this may involve “spreading” the patch code out among various different “slices” of padding, if there is no one contiguous block that is long enough to contain the entire patch.

In this case, however, due to the fact that the routine to retrieve the SYSTEM_BASIC_INFORMATION structure was a dedicated, isolated routine, and that it had some error handling code for “unlikely” situations (such as failing a memory allocation, or failing the NtQuerySystemInformation(…SystemBasicInformation…) call (although, it would appear the latter is not quite so “unlikely” in this case), a different option presented itself: Dispense with the error checking, most of which would rarely be used in a realistic situation, and use the extra space to write in some code to convert the structure layout to the version expected by kernrate 3790.0. Obviously, while not a completely “clean” solution per se, the idea does have its merits when you’re already into patch-the-binary-on-disk-land (which pretty much rules out the idea of a “clean” solution altogether at that point).

The structure conversion is fairly straightforward code, and after a bit of poking around, I had a version to try out. Lo and behold, it actually worked; it turns out that the only thing that was preventing the prerelease 3790.0/x64 kernrate from doing basic kernel profiling on production x64 kernels was the layout of the SYSTEM_BASIC_INFORMATION structure.

For those so inclined, the patch I created effectively rewrites the original version of the function, as shown below after translated to C:

Conceptually represented in C, the modified (patched) function would appear something like the following (note that the error checking code has been removed to make room for the structure conversion logic, as previously mentioned; the substantial new changes are colored in red):

(Note that the patch code was not compiler-generated and is not truly a function written in C; below is simply how it would look if it were translated from assembler to C.)

(The structure can be converted in-place due to how the two versions are laid out in memory; the “expected” version is larger than the “real” version (and more specifically, the offsets of all the fields we care about are greater in the “expected” version than the “real” version), so structure fields can safely be copied from the tail of the “real” structure to the tail of the “expected” structure.)

If you find yourself in a similar bind, and need a working kernrate for x64 (until if and when Microsoft puts out a new version that is compatible with production x64 kernels), I’ve posted the patch (assembler, with opcode diffs) that I made to the “amd64” release of kernrate.exe from the 3790.0 DDK. Any conventional hex editor should be sufficient to apply it (as far as I know, third parties aren’t authorized to redistribute kernrate in its entirety, so I’m not posting the entire binary). Note that DDKs after the 3790.0 DDK don’t include any kernrate for x64 (even the prerelease version, broken as it was), so you’ll also need the original 3790.0 DDK to use the patch. Hopefully, we may see an update to kernrate at some point, but for now, the patch suffices in a pinch if you really need to profile a Windows x64 system.

Yes. x64 was not ready for RTM at the time when Srv03 (3790.0) went gold. It was released out-of-synch with the other two supported platforms. As a result, the first public release of Srv03 x64 was 3790.1830, as it was first publicly released after SP1 went out for the other platforms.